A grand romance

Samuel Barber's first opera was a hit on its opening night - only to be denounced as 'un-American'. Did its fall from grace have anything to do with the composer's lifelong relationship with another man? By Tim Ashley

The premiere of Samuel Barber's Vanessa, on January 15 1958, was a grand event. It was Barber's first opera, and the first new work by an American composer to be presented at New York's notoriously conservative Metropolitan Opera House for over a decade. Expectations were enormous. "It is as if the honour of the nation depended on the man who had the temerity to create the piece," one critic noted.

The opera was hugely popular with its first-night audience. Newsweek reported that Barber's appearance was greeted with "the full-throated roar usually reserved for prima donnas", while the conductor, Greek-born Dimitri Mitropoulos, was quoted as enthusiastically exclaiming: "At last, an American grand opera!"

Soon, however, there was a groundswell of disapproval. The post-Romantic idiom of Barber's music was compared, favourably and unfavourably, with Puccini and Strauss. The opera's setting "in a northern country in 1905" was identified as European. The fact that Barber's output constituted a Jamesian dialogue between Europe and the US was ignored. "This is opera in the grand manner stemming from the Romantic tradition of central Europe and Italy," one writer fulminated. "It is American only in so far as its composer was born in this country." When the production transferred to the Salzburg festival the following summer, there were more acerbic comments about the inherent un-Americanness of Vanessa.

The opera, which is being performed in concert at the Barbican tomorrow, still has a reputation for being "unclassifiable". That has hindered its public acceptance and a genuine critical appraisal of its worth.

Assessing its genesis is also difficult. The libretto is by the Italian composer-writer Gian Carlo Menotti, described as Barber's "life-long partner" or "life-long friend". At this point, however, one runs into trouble. Biographies of either man refrain from defining their relationship as homosexual, and the emotional vicissitudes between them, though frequently alluded to, remain imperfectly documented.

They met as students at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia in 1928. Barber was 18, Menotti a year younger. They remained companions, shuttling between the US and Italy until the outbreak of the second world war, finally moving, in 1943, to a mansion in upstate New York bought with money donated by one of Barber's female sponsors. The property was sold in 1973, when Menotti decided to return to Europe. Thereafter, their relationship was seemingly conducted at long distance. Menotti settled in Scotland, where he still lives, now aged 92. Barber, who described himself in later life as "homeless", died of cancer in New York in 1981. Menotti was at his bedside.

That an element of creative tension existed between them was, however, inevitable. When Barber began work on the score of Vanessa in 1954, he was already regarded as one of the US's foremost composers of orchestral and vocal music. Menotti, meanwhile, an instinctive man of the theatre, had risen to become the rebellious voice of contemporary American opera.

The Met, which would soon be clamouring for Barber's new score, had not always been kind to Menotti, whose The Island God had been one of the house's biggest flops in 1942. Thereafter, his finest works, invariably to his own librettos, were produced away from mainstream houses. He took opera to Broadway half a century before Baz Luhrmann staged La Bohème there. He experimented with film and radio. His best-known work, Amahl and the Night Visitors, was originally written for TV.

Barber, meanwhile, had been hankering after writing opera as early as 1932, though he initially avoided approaching his partner for a text. Finding both subject and librettist, however, proved tricky. Discussions with Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas and Stephen Spender came to nothing. He considered Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, but rejected it on the grounds that the "poetic language is adequate in itself and leaves no room for music".

It would seem that, in 1952, Menotti volunteered to write a libretto. "We had the usual suspicions that very good friends have about each other," Barber said. "I wondered if he would really do it. He wondered if I really could do it." Though Menotti rapidly produced the text of the first act, he was soon involved in projects of his own and began to stall. Barber had to resort to threats to abandon the project in its entirety before the libretto was complete. He considered it Menotti's finest text, and it is, indeed, a remarkable piece of work.

The main source is usually cited as Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen (pseudonym of the Danish writer Karen Blixen), from which Menotti extracted the kernel of the opera's imagery, though not its narrative. Among Dinesen's symbols, we find mirrors used to reflect the inescapable truths her characters must face. The world of Vanessa is similarly filled with mirrors, but, tellingly, they remain covered. There are also echoes of Tennessee Williams's Blanche DuBois in the opera's heroine, a woman of great beauty but no longer young. Just as Blanche can't bear her face to be seen under a naked light, so Vanessa is pathologically unable to look at herself in a glass for fear of being reminded of her encroaching age.

The opera's world is one of secrets, lies and evasions, and beneath its elegant surface lurk intimations of deep trauma. The subject is the bitter conflict between emotional idealism and sexual reality. Vanessa has immured herself in her mansion, obsessively waiting for the return of Anatol, a married man with whom she had an affair 20 years previously. Her only companions are her niece Erika, a virginal young dreamer, and Vanessa's mother, the Baroness. The latter, the opera's terrifying arbiter of moral truth, refuses to speak to anyone she considers to be living a lie, and has maintained a bitter silence towards her daughter since the end of her relationship with Anatol.

A man called Anatol does, indeed, arrive. However, he proves to be not Vanessa's former lover, but his son, a handsome (if unscrupulous) opportunist, who promptly seduces Erika. The encounter brings about her sexual awakening, but also makes her aware of his essential inability to love. Even when she realises she is pregnant, she rejects him, demanding "each woman's right to wait for her true love to come". Anatol turns his attentions to Vanessa, who, believing him to be his father's "younger self", is soon besotted.

The night Vanessa and Anatol formally announce their engagement, Erika, in a deeply alarming scene, rushes from the house and deliberately harms herself in order to abort the baby. Vanessa, locked in her own delusions and unwilling even to confront her suspicions of Anatol's previous attraction to Erika, leaves with him to face a future we know to be catastrophic. Erika, meanwhile, immures herself in the mansion. It is her turn to wait, as her aunt did previously. She has, however, lied to Vanessa about her pregnancy and her abortion and now must live with the Baroness's obdurate silence.

Whether the opera in some sense constitutes the reflections of Menotti and Barber on their relationship remains a matter for conjecture. Menotti, however, in an elliptical statement, has led us to think that it might. Barber, he claimed, "felt ours should be an immortal friendship. It is that, but somehow it didn't turn out the way he imagined it."

Both Vanessa and Erika do indeed yearn for a love that is immortal, and respectively evade and confront the fact that "somehow it didn't turn out" the way they imagined it. Barber, in giving musical voice both to their longings and to Anatol's pervasive, if dangerous, sexuality, produced a score of great beauty and ferocious lyrical passion, characterised above all by a disquieting sense of intimacy that often leaves you feeling like an eavesdropper on someone else's private world.

Confronted with the critics who found Vanessa un-American, Barber rejoined: "Art is international, and if an opera is inspired, it needs no boundaries." Like any major work, Vanessa aspires to encapsulate universal experiences. Perhaps the time is right for its acceptance - both as the unique product of the relationship between two of 20th-century music's most remarkable figures, and as a bitter meditation on the emotional games people play in the name of love.